I am experiencing the same problem as listed in other posts on this topic, but with a twist that is keeping me from resolving the problem.
I have a 160gb WD USB external drive of my brother's that I'm trying to save for him, and we're experiencing all of the same symptoms as the other posts on this topic. The drive is automatically recognized when plugged in, drivers auto install, windows correctly identifies the drive and gives full drive name, device manager says it is there and operating properly etc etc, but the drive is not listed in windows explorer as others report. When I try to change the drive letter in disk management as the many other posts suggest, changing the name is not an option for this drive. My only options for the afflicted drive are "New simple volume", "New spanned volume" and "New striped volume" and of course properties.
Here are a list of fixes I have tried without success.
1. Tried different USB ports and different USB cable.
2. Tried 4 different machines running Vista Ultimate SP1 (Desktop Core i7 6gb RAM), Vista Basic (Desktop Core 2 Duo, 4gb RAM), Vista Home Premium SP1 (Laptop Core 2 Duo 2gb RAM) and XP Home SP3 (Laptop Celeron 512gb RAM)
3. Stopped device with "safely remove hardware", uninstalled through device manager, rebooted with device connected.
4. Renamed hard drives and optical drives to x-z to make D-G available to afflicted drive.
5. Repeated all steps with hard drives and optical drives assigned new drive letters.
6. Edited registry and removed all entries under hkey_local_machine/system/mountedDevices referring to all but hard drives and optical drives.
7. Repeated all steps again with registry entries removed.
After everything, windows still detects and installs the drive, device manager says it's there etc etc but I can not assign the drive a new letter or get it to show up in explorer.
It looks to me like if I set up a new volume on the disk, it will be recognized and possibly work correctly, however to do that the drive has to be formatted, which is not an option since my brother's backup data is on that drive and the original data was lost from his hard drive when the motherboard shorted out.
I've searched the web high and low and tried every fix with exception to pulling the drive from the enclosure (sonic welded sealed plastic enclosure so I can't try that) but nothing is working. Does anyone have something else to try short of professional data recovery?
Vista Ultimate SP1
EVGA X58 motherboard
Core i7 940 2.93ghz
6gb OCZ Gold 1600mhz tri channel
3 SATA HD & 2 IDE optical (drive letters C-G)
I have a 160gb WD USB external drive of my brother's that I'm trying to save for him, and we're experiencing all of the same symptoms as the other posts on this topic. The drive is automatically recognized when plugged in, drivers auto install, windows correctly identifies the drive and gives full drive name, device manager says it is there and operating properly etc etc, but the drive is not listed in windows explorer as others report. When I try to change the drive letter in disk management as the many other posts suggest, changing the name is not an option for this drive. My only options for the afflicted drive are "New simple volume", "New spanned volume" and "New striped volume" and of course properties.
Here are a list of fixes I have tried without success.
1. Tried different USB ports and different USB cable.
2. Tried 4 different machines running Vista Ultimate SP1 (Desktop Core i7 6gb RAM), Vista Basic (Desktop Core 2 Duo, 4gb RAM), Vista Home Premium SP1 (Laptop Core 2 Duo 2gb RAM) and XP Home SP3 (Laptop Celeron 512gb RAM)
3. Stopped device with "safely remove hardware", uninstalled through device manager, rebooted with device connected.
4. Renamed hard drives and optical drives to x-z to make D-G available to afflicted drive.
5. Repeated all steps with hard drives and optical drives assigned new drive letters.
6. Edited registry and removed all entries under hkey_local_machine/system/mountedDevices referring to all but hard drives and optical drives.
7. Repeated all steps again with registry entries removed.
After everything, windows still detects and installs the drive, device manager says it's there etc etc but I can not assign the drive a new letter or get it to show up in explorer.
It looks to me like if I set up a new volume on the disk, it will be recognized and possibly work correctly, however to do that the drive has to be formatted, which is not an option since my brother's backup data is on that drive and the original data was lost from his hard drive when the motherboard shorted out.
I've searched the web high and low and tried every fix with exception to pulling the drive from the enclosure (sonic welded sealed plastic enclosure so I can't try that) but nothing is working. Does anyone have something else to try short of professional data recovery?
Vista Ultimate SP1
EVGA X58 motherboard
Core i7 940 2.93ghz
6gb OCZ Gold 1600mhz tri channel
3 SATA HD & 2 IDE optical (drive letters C-G)